Sunday, August 9, 2020

Making Jellies and Jams Summer of a pandemic - reflections from Peg 1918 and today.

Good morning now Sept 27, 2020,staying home here near Haha Wakpa, the Mississippi River, grateful to have a roof over our head and able to reflect on life and the current pandemic, and listening to my Tibetan teacher Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, about how to dance with fear, and learning the Chod practices to live in the midst of the life and death reality of a pandemic.  He invites us to consider this as a global retreat and can bring the best out of us...Time to rest and to re awaken to our life purpose of listening to life and self care.  Now in Sept, still taking care of ourselves and took a 16 mile bike ride from
Mississippi River looking west from Anoka County (Fridley) to Hennepin County (Brooklyn Center) on Sept 24, 2020. 
Mississippi River east side early autumn photo Sept 24, 2020
Blog author, Tom Weaver at Golden Lake North Rice Creek Trail, Sept 13 by Jon Nisja
Tom Weaver with compass plant prairie along North Rice Lake Trail 
And the bounty of fruit harvested and made into jam and jelly found in and around the area here in MniShota Makoce.  Jams and Jellies to share during waniyetu, the winter times. 
 
Reflections on the bounty of the tree nation, the chan oyate with fruits....Juneberries found on some 7 trees North Mississippi Park in Minneapolis about a mile from our home. 
 June berries in June, on the tree, the purple ones are more ripe and sweet....
June berries washed in the kitchen ---
June Berry Pie, out of the oven ----fun to eat with a scoop of ice cream.....


Took a June day trip with my friend Doug Beumer, on the left up to Lake Itasca with a bike ride around the lake of some 17 miles. Here we are at the headwaters of the Mississippi .   Hope to drive up again this fall to see the colors.  Douglas Lodge ?  And Now for other berries and fruits. 

Next after juneberries at chokecherries, that have a big pit and thus are making jelly and use a jelly bag


Chokecherries on the shrubs by the Greenway    
Red leafed bushes with ripe cherries below
   



 
Not a fan of the "updated" way to blog on this currently free way to write online.  Difficult to insert text with the various photos - Above all the fruits harvested this year to put away for winter during this pandemic....From the top  -1)  Juneberries (Amelancher a rose family plant with small seeds) ,  2) Chokecherry, larger seeds, pits and make jelly using a jelly bag.  4 batches of jelly this year in July mostly.  3) Wild plum made one batch of jam, from fruits harvested in August Elm Creek Park Preserve
4) Crabapple-apple jelly,  Chestnut Crab apples in Golden Valley with Apples added, one batch, and 5) in Sept went to buy Aronia shrubs


.Part of this for me, is to more deeply reconnect with my earth centered connection to the Dakota and Lakota nations through our MN Hollow Horn Bear Tiospaye by re-reading Lakota America, A New History of Indigenous Power, Yale University Press 2019 by Finnish Author Pekka Hamalainen, that was given to us by brother Jim Weaver late in 2019.  Lots of teachings about the role of epidemics, esp small pox in the history of Turtle Island (North America).  Here is a map from page 16 of the book.




 "The ancestral Sioux shifted slowly and moved west"
AND from my mom's memoir, who was 8 years of age during the Spanish Flu Epidemic.
From Peg Weaver's self published Remembrings of an 83 year old grandma, regarding 1918, WWI and the concurrent flu pandemic  p 11 "
When I seven or eight years old, my father had abscesses at the base of his spine which required several major operations, a surgeon, Dr. Frick, coming from Toledo to perform the first one. Because this was during a disastrous influenza epidemic during World War I, the Findlay hospital being short of nurses was glad to have my mother stay at the hospital to care for my father (where, incidentally, she learned the proper way to make beds with mitered sheet corners). During that time I lived with Grandmother, Grandfather Glessner and Aunt Mary. When more surgery was done in Toledo, removing several inches of his tail-bone, the surgeon thought that my father might never walk again. These were grim days in my home, worry about my father's recovery and about meeting the medical expenses since health insurance didn't exist.
After my father came home for the hospital, for months he was confined to bed, lying on a cot in the bungalow dining room, where I remember my mother dressing his bloody wounds. When the roof of our bungalow caught on fire, the fire department was called but went to the wrong address, a bakery, which the firemen couldn't enter because it was a "coal-less Monday", the day when businesses closed to save fuel for the war effort. Finally, the firemen arrived to discover that my mother had put out the fire, carrying buckets of water up a ladder to the attic. We all moved to by grandparents' until the hole in the roof was repaired.
During the war I remember going down into the basement to get "fresh eggs" out of sticky, icky, cold waterglass, a process for preserving eggs. Anti-German feeling was so strong that my mother destroyed her German text books. At school I bought War Savings Bonds and learned to knit small "squares" of irregular shapes to send "over there" for washcloths. Geraldine, my fourteen-inch tall wooden doll, was named for my dance teacher, Geraldine Moss, had eye-lashed eyes that blinked and moveable joints fitted with springs so that she could assume and maintain all sorts of poses. My mother made two timely outfits for her: a Red Cross nurse's and a soldier's. With the soldier's garb (an olive-drab, jaunty over-seas cap, proper-fitting jacket, jodpur-like pants and puttees) she won a prize in a Toledo contest.
When General Black-Jack Pershing was at a reception at the Findlay Elks Club after the war, I was thrilled to shake the hand of the war hero who led American troops in Europe. His handsome son accompanied him, which was exciting for us grade school girls. "

Also reflecting on postage stamps, and the reflection of history....Really enjoyed collecting stamps as a boy and having stamp exchanges with other kids around the world when I was young.  Australia, Southern Rhodesia, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, New Zealand, Japan and more.  Got a sense of world geography through that - and later with a German Friend to collect and exchange as an adult.  History and cultural things for understanding.

 
Here is the US Stamp of a series that has a lot of white guys mostly presidents and all, and this is Chief Hollow Horn Bear, a Lakota, and the great grandfather of relative whose chan nupa, prayer pipe was returned to his relatives to pray with beginning in 1989 at the Hollow Horn Bear Sun dance near St Francis SD.  I started praying there in July 1990- and here is the flyer from that dance where I met Joe Eagle Elk and Rudy Runs Above who were guides for us on how to pray and dance in a good way.
 
 
Here is one of the dancers prior to the dance  in 2018 at the cook shack with a mature prairie turnip, Marvin who is another descendant of the chief.  Such great memories.

Tuesday, March 31, 2020

Faribault Resort Destination 1919 Post WWI and Flu Pandemic -Lessons for Today.




Curious here in 2020, during the time of refuge, requested by leadership to prevent farther spread of a corona virus believed to have jumped as an RNA virus from wet market animals in Wuhan in Central China in 2019, and we have been asked this past month in March to physically and socially distance. I flash back to the times here on Turtle Island of 100 years ago.  Here is a 1919 cover of a map sponsored by businesses in my hometown of Faribault MN, inviting tourists, now with automobiles more in the cities, to replace horses as a primary mode of transportation.....Learning about history and how things do repeat over time.  Thinking about Ford's Model T, that made the new travel technology affordable for regular folks.  "On October 1, 1908, the first production Model T Ford is completed at the company’s Piquette Avenue plant in Detroit. Between 1908 and 1927, Ford would build some 15 million Model T cars. It was the longest production run of any automobile model in history until the Volkswagen Beetle surpassed it in 1972." From https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/ford-motor-company-unveils-the-model-t
FROM TODAY's 2020 Eagle Eye view of His/Herstory - Inspired that the Dakhota name, Minnewasta, meaning "Mni -Water, Waste' Good' is the name of the Roberd's Lake resort in 1919, soon after WW I, "The war to end all wars" and the event that took more lives internationally than the human conflict dis-ease of WAR, more "we are right", likely another corona virus in 2020 hindsight from Wiki"The Spanish flu was an unusually deadly influenza pandemic. Lasting from January 1918 to December 1920, it infected 500 million people—about a quarter of the world's population at the time. The death toll is estimated to have been anywhere from 17 million to 50 million, and possibly as high as 100 million, making it one of the deadliest pandemics in human history.
  
Curious who made it to Roberd's Lake outside of Faribault in 1919, in the midst of the pandemic?  Plan to post a link to a Facebook page that many Faribault and Rice County natives and current residents add to and comment. Thinking of local fresh eggs, and fresh caught fish ---the fold up map in side was delivered to the current owners not long ago accompanied by Jeff Jarvis and local historian, artist and native of Rice County.   
 Here is the folded map that I labeled "1919RandMcNallyFaribault15HammondHwy2JeffersonHwy61" in the scan made prior to giving the map to the current owners...Note the few roads, and 61 and 2 from Northfield through Dundas back in those early days of auto travel.

And here is a 1923 Rice County Map North of Faribault.
And with some of the green road, major, and then the gravel red roads in 1923,  Rice County MN in 1923  ---
Grateful that life all goes on, new threads of life...we are generating as some of the old dominoes fall. Letting go of what no longer serves.....and now what is emerging. From Charles Eisenstein "A corona is a crown. “Novel coronavirus pandemic” means “a new coronation for all.”
Already we can feel the power of who we might become. A true sovereign does not run in fear from life or from death. A true sovereign does not dominate and conquer (that is a shadow archetype, the Tyrant). The true sovereign serves the people, serves life, and respects the sovereignty of all people. The coronation marks the emergence of the unconscious into consciousness, the crystallization of chaos into order, the transcendence of compulsion into choice. We become the rulers of that which had ruled us. The New World Order that the conspiracy theorists fear is a shadow of the glorious possibility available to sovereign beings. No longer the vassals of fear, we can bring order to the kingdom and build an intentional society on the love already shining through the cracks of the world of separation.